afternoon in the woods. Pulled them off himself, as well. Fat, bloated, disgusting things. He closed his eyes.
“Okay, up you go,” he said. “But if one of those things comes off on me, you’re in big trouble.”
The animal couldn’t have weighed more than eight or nine pounds. When Mark lifted it, he felt its ribs and heard its heart fluttering. Mark held it against his chest.
He walked back to the clinic, pushed the door open with his hip and walked in.
“Car won’t start?” Mabel asked as she looked up from her registration sheet. “Oh my God, what on earth…?” She came around the counter at a run.
“Stray, found him under my car. Can you take him?”
He held the dog out, but it struggled to remain in his arms.
“Wait, I’ll call Dr. Marsdon.”
Two minutes later, when Sarah reached across the steel examining table to take the dog, he whimpered again and buried his head under the shoulder of Mark’s jacket.
Mark cupped him possessively. “You’re scaring him.”
“I know,” Sarah said. She came around the table. “Hey, sweetie, it’s okay.” She stroked the small body.
Her gentle voice, the soft hand that touched his chest as she reached for the dog, made Mark’s whole body tense.
She took the dog and set it carefully on the table. “Hand me some of those towels over there,” she said, pointing to the corner of the room.
Mark complied. She began to dry the dog gently. It cowered on its belly, eyes never leaving Mark’s face.
“We’ve got to get these ticks off,” Sarah said. “Lord knows how much blood she’s lost.”
“She?”
“She. Didn’t you check?”
“Who could tell under all that matted hair?”
“Well, she’s a she, and…” Sarah raised the corner of the dog’s mouth. “Her gums are pretty red. That’s a good sign. It means she’s not as anemic as I thought she might be, with all the fleas and ticks.”
“Fleas?” Mark began to feel itchy at the very suggestion.
Sarah glanced up. “Don’t worry. They prefer dogs when there’s one available. Just hold her, while I take some blood and fecal samples for a workup.”
The dog cowered deeper against him. He put a hand protectively around her head.
Sarah sighed. “I won’t hurt her, I promise. But we need to see whether or not she has heartworm.”
She picked up a needle and syringe. Mark tensed.
“Oh, come on,” Sarah said as she stuck the needle into the flesh of the dog’s neck and drew a vial of dark blood. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” She disappeared from the room for a moment with the vial.
When she came back, she said, “We can get quick results on the heartworm test. In the meantime, give me a hand bathing her. She trusts you. After that, we’ll get the vermin off, trim off all that hair, then we’ll give her another bath—and by that time we may see what kind of a pup we’ve got here.”
“Pup?”
“Probably less than a year old. Mostly Jack Russell terrier would be my guess, but with something furry mixed in. Maybe Lhasa apso or shih tzu. Whatever gave her all this hair, it’s got to go.”
“So do I,” Mark said. “She’s in good hands.”
“No, you don’t,” Sarah said. “She’s your responsibility. Some idiot abandoned her or lost her, and she’s found you. You try to walk out that door, buster, and I will personally lock it and throw away the key.”
“All I did was find her.”
“That’s all it takes. Give me those scissors—we need to cut this collar off her and start cutting some of the worst stuff off before we stick her in the washtub.”
“If she’s lost, we can call her owners.”
“No address on the collar. I’ve got Mabel checking the want ads we keep on the computer—but the dog doesn’t have a registration tag, and I can’t feel a microchip under her skin. There may not be owners looking for her. Somebody may have simply tossed her out with the garbage. People do it all the time.” Sarah’s voice was suddenly hard.
Over the next hour, the pup had a flea and tick bath, and was personally deloused by Sarah—and Mark, at Sarah’s insistence. Then the matted hair was snipped, clipped and shaved. Finally the little dog had another bath, but this time the bathwater was clean and not crimson from her blood.
Jack Renfro stuck his head in the door, as they were toweling the dog off for the second time. “The test says no heartworm. Lucky.”
“Thank God,” Sarah said. “But we’ll give her her shots and start her on dewormer and flea stuff and everything else she needs. Bring me a couple of cans of dog food and a water dish. She’s been damn patient with us, but I suspect she’s starving, and I know she’s dehydrated.”
“Shouldn’t we have fed her first?” Mark asked, rubbing the small head with the towel.
“Judgment call. I wanted to see what we had to work with.”
Mark guessed that Sarah wanted to see whether the little dog was too sick to be saved. He gave a small prayer of thanks that apparently the tiny dog wasn’t.
She was, however, hungry. She devoured a can of food and drank half a bowl of water, while Sarah and Mark looked on, smiling like happy parents.
“She’s really a precious little thing,” Sarah said as she stroked the newly fluffy white head, with its black circles around the eyes and over one ear. “How could anyone toss her out to die like that?”
She glanced up at Mark, who saw tears in her eyes.
“She would have died, you know. If not tonight, then tomorrow or the next day. Run over by a car, eaten by a coyote or a bigger dog. Or she’d have starved to death eventually. It makes me so angry!” Sarah said.
“If the people who owned her couldn’t look after her any longer and couldn’t find a home for her, why wouldn’t they take her to the Humane Society?”
“Because people have this crazy idea that letting an animal, a pet animal like this, out into the world to fend for itself is all right. I would love to throw those people out into a totally unfamiliar environment and see how well they do.”
“Harsh.”
“Not really. We understand what we’re doing. They—” she touched the pup “—don’t.”
“So what happens now? You put her up for adoption?”
Sarah stared at
